


lost in translation

by pistolgrip



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 22:31:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pistolgrip/pseuds/pistolgrip
Summary: The words Karm leaves behind for Six, and the way Siete never seems to fit any of them.





	lost in translation

_Tell me what the word for love is_, Siete asks. _You must have had a word for love. _

The request elicits a humourless laugh out of him.

There was not a single word for love, nor was there anything close to an equivalent. The Karm people were a people of necessity and a people of action. Love is not an action. Love is a _feeling_. In the old language of Karm, the remnants of which were alive only in the memory of the atrocities hurled at him, they had minimal words for emotions. Emotions were nothing but a hindrance. If they had to address them past the point of acknowledgement, they were prefaced as _obstacles._

_That's silly, _Siete says.

Six has been Karm's last vestige and its final heir for years now. For most of his life, Karm was all he knew. Despite wanting to abandon it at every turn, he grows defensive at Siete's flippant tone. What would Siete know know about the constant reminder of the punishment he was meant to suffer?

Siete continues. _Then what emotions _did_ you guys have words for? _Six isn't sure whether he wants to hide the signs of irritation—his fists clenching, the deep sigh he takes beneath his mask—or if he wants Siete to know that the line of questioning is flirting with dangerous territory.

Even still, as is Siete's power with words, Six ends up giving it thought.

The words that come to mind for him to share are awkward in his mouth, rusty but kept alive through sheer spite. The moment he lets Karm's language die is a moment closer to the afterlife he has to one day face. It is possible that he may one day forget everything about Karm, but his eventual punishment would always be waiting for him; he never wants the peace of forgetting for the pain the reminder brings.

The words arrive first in Karm's language, and then he translates. _Anger, _he responds, not knowing how long it's been since Siete's asked. It's easy to remember a word that hovers over his shoulder with every breath he takes. It has a direct equivalent in languages Siete can understand, but another word for anger rises behind it with a different nuance. It rolls off his tongue as easily as the first, but it takes time to put it into a single term that Siete can understand. _Scorn, _he decides. It's not the same.

_Betrayal, _he says, and then he pauses. This one he says without thinking, but it follows behind _anger _and _scorn_ as readily as flowing water. The translated word doesn't describe an emotion, but it causes the same acrid recoil as the one in his (_whose?_) language, one that had been branded into his consciousness from the moment he first gained it. His birth and subsequent irrepressible power had been a betrayal to his clan, and they went to great lengths to remind him. Try as he might, there is no equivalent in other languages to the burden that was thrust upon him with the word and became an irremovable part of him, even when no one remained to remind him but himself.

_...Pride, _he says next, at a loss. Perform an execution to exact specifications. Maintaining structure and order for greatest efficiency. This wasn't the same pride that Siete was privy to, a pride that could be still be exposed to the sun and bask in its warmth. This pride came with the blood on their hands becoming a source of contentment, power, and status. This pride could not be complete without death.

_No happiness? _Siete says. He says it with a joking edge, but his voice softens in compassion. It makes the hard edges of Six's sordid history jut out like barbed wire, and yet Siete continues a conversation, dragging himself against the defences Six prepares.

Happiness, too, had no sufficient equivalent. _Satisfaction _is the closest thing he has to the word he has in Karm's language, but it was a shallow happiness stemming directly from good results.

_Satisfaction is the only thing I have. For anything like this, I must delve into other languages._

_Seems like a lonely language,_ Siete says.

He looks like he wants to reach out for Six, sharp edges and all.

_My memories of Karm are of lonely people. Their greatest sense of cohesiveness may have been to drive me out of the clan, and this was their result._

He doesn't know what's in the look that Siete gives him now. Words related to emotions are still nonsensical to him. It could be sympathy. It could be pity. It could be the one word whose meaning he'd never had a sufficient explanation for in any language, and the thought terrifies him.

He stands up without warning, and Siete looks up at him. He doesn't stand to follow, allowing Six an escape, but he still manages to ensnare him by having the final word. _One more thing._

_What? _

_That phrase I've been signing off to you with in our letters. What does it mean?_

Six swallows. He knows that carelessly writing a phrase with his old language in a letter to Siete prompted him to start this conversation about his history, but he doesn't feel equipped to speak about it. _You'd parrot anything you see without asking its meaning?_

_You cared enough to send it to me. I didn't think it'd be anything bad._

Siete doesn't specify what it is he thinks Six cares about, whether it's that he cares about Siete or about the preservation Karm language. That's all he says, and despite years of experience with Siete's misdirections, Six fails to guess his intention during times like this.

_You're a fool, _he prefaces. _'Do not fail me'._

_That's what it means? _

It's not a lie. But it's not the truth, either. Six has had many years to mull over the phrase for its nuances, although the only context he has is the faded exchanges from childhood before he was scorned. _That's as close as I can get. 'Do not fail me', or... _

He hesitates. If he were to tell Siete the truth, he would find too much enjoyment in it, and Six doesn't like the way the thought of it alters his heart rate. He finds something else to say. _'I trust in you'. But the wording is not quite so sentimental. It lies somewhere in between, much closer to the former._

_I'll choose the more sentimental one, then! _Siete gets another look on his face that Six doesn't know how to interpret, but he hates it enough to look away, feeling his face grow hot.

_I know. _Six responds for the sake of responding, not understanding what it is that he knows, but not wanting to let Siete have the last word. _I know._

* * *

Karm's language had no word for _love_. Excessive attachment was discouraged; this is where Six found the closest word he had for love, _attachment_, a word with a risk_. _But their way of life required them to know the dominant language of the skydom, and so he would hear those words.

_Love. Happiness. _

When he was young enough to accompany his father on missions, he would hear them. _Don't you have someone you love? _the victims would ask. _Do you think you can escape eternal damnation after you've taken away someone's happiness? _His father would never respond, focused on finishing his job. That was their duty.

Six asked, once, what those words meant. _Love is attachment, _his father said. _And happiness is irrational when attached to anything but perfect execution. Remember that._

When that skyfarer arrived into his life after his massacre, Six didn't have the words to describe the stillness that came over him. He knew the word _calm_, but there would be still be a disturbance in his mental stability. He felt _anticipation_ in that short time that the man spent with him, separate from the calm.

In that time, he learnt _peace_, and then that man took peace with him and Six decided to dedicate his entire life to chasing it. Perhaps all of that together meant _love_. Not even that man could explain love to him, telling him that it was inexplicable and that he'd know when he found it.

What Six felt for the man could always be stemmed to something positive, and so he called it _love_. Not even his own blood father had made him feel this way. Karm didn't have a word for _love,_ so it would make sense that the discovery of that word would come after he had extinguished the Karm clan by his own hands.

* * *

He meets Siete.

He meets Siete, and his world changes. There are too many changes to determine for himself whether they are good or bad, but the nature of the unfamiliar predisposes him to dislike the changes that Siete brings.

Siete is—he doesn't have a good translation for what Siete is, but certain words spring to mind without giving them conscious thought. A hindrance (except that Siete is the strongest of the Eternals, both physically and mentally). A pain (except that Siete knows how to be compassionate when appropriate). A distraction (except that Siete always knows exactly what he's doing, deflecting Six away from his past and into an uncertain future). He is all these negative things, but with footnotes that may as well be counterpoints with how compelling an argument they hold against Six's attempts to slander the man.

Siete knows too much and says too little of his own self, and it frustrates Six to no end that while he gives so readily, Siete maintains greater control. He gets closer and closer to Siete in an attempt to invoke equivalent exchange, until he's so dangerously close that he realizes he's being lured in—and then, the realization falls that Siete has never been transparent about trying to get close to him in return.

This isn't love. Six feels no attachment (except he does, growing used to the Siete-shaped silhouette wandering the base and smiling at him). Six feels no calm (except that he trusts his competence in battle above all personality deficits until he feels no apprehension). Six feels no peace (and this one has no exception, because with Siete, he disarms himself without a second thought, more concerned with trying to pierce through Siete's armour than to maintain his own).

Siete rarely asks about Karm in a straightforward manner, but Six can tell in how he phrases questions about Six's past, respectful but curious, waiting for Six to open up on his own terms. He sees it in the way his eyes light up whenever Six says even one word about Karm, no matter its connotations. The persistence over time wears him down, so at the end of one of his correspondences one day, he writes in the almost-forgotten language this:

_May the grace of your hands carry my life. _

The words are little more than a saying to him. It had been turned onto him in thinly-veiled mockery before the Karm clan stopped restricting their scorn for him. He hates the sound of it as he rolls it off his tongue. He hates the sound of it as he pens it to paper.

It's why he sent it to Siete, he decides, hours after he finishes mailing the letter without scratching the phrase out, despite his rational mind having no good reason for doing so. He exorcises it once and for all by putting it in Siete's consciousness and letting him butcher it until it's unrecognizable.

Siete doesn't comment on it in the following letters, so Six continues to write it, committing the words to memory while diminishing its impact at by giving it a witness that cannot understand. The more he mangles his handwriting, the less resemblance it holds to any language, and he wonders what Siete thinks about the mess of incomprehensible ink at the end of every letter.

One day, he receives a letter from Siete with that same phrase, written at the end.

Penned in Siete's handwriting, the shapes of the letters were accurate, if not unsure of itself. But he knows this—the writing may be unsure of itself, but Siete knew what he was doing.

Six's next letter was curt: _Why did you write this back to me? _To which Siete responded, _Were you sending me naughty things the entire time? I didn't take you as that type, _and Six had to restrain himself from throwing the letter in the garbage, because _still_ Siete signed it off with the same words.

_That_ wasn't love.

He found no peace of mind in Siete's presence when his heartbeat accelerated to the point of restricting his breathing. At first he thought it was anger simmering down to annoyance, and then he'd find himself missing the space that Siete seemed to perpetually occupy in not just his life, but all of the Eternals'.

He read that closing message, in Siete's handwriting, until his eyes could no longer parse the letters.

This wasn't _love_. This was a standard farewell placing faith in the skill of the witness, and over time it lost its meaning, becoming as rote as _hello _and _goodbye_.

But Siete brought ceaseless change with him. He changed Six's routine, and Six was desperate to call the changes detrimental simply because they were unfamiliar. Because of him, Six transformed his _hello_s into _how are you_s and his _goodbye_s into _see you again_s.

He lost the heart of life; of all people, it was Siete that had found it, returned it, but not without keeping part of it as his own.

* * *

_Tell me what the word for love is_, Siete asks. _You must have had a word for love. _

The request elicits a humourless laugh out of him.

There was not a single word for love, nor was there anything close to an equivalent. Emotions were nothing but a hindrance. If they had to address them past the point of acknowledgement, they were prefaced as _obstacles._

The Karm clan was correct on that observation. For Six, they are the obstacle that constricts his breathing when Siete approaches him about his memories of Karm, asking what he'd want to keep and what he'd want to rid himself of, as if Siete could be of any help. They are the stutter in his actions when Siete, with a perpetual smile even in the face of adversity, asks him how to pronounce the message with which Six signs off. They are the fault in his rational thinking when Siete returns from a mission with soreness, but no lacerations. Six can never forget the knowledge taught to him as Karm's heir, and he chooses to pass it through his hands to Siete's body rather than leaving it to rot.

Those were the hands that Siete trusted to carry his life. He continues writing it to Six and only to Six, even when given the harshest translation, and only because he chose to believe in the kinder meaning. Siete made no sense, but it was the same logic he applied to Six as a person. To acknowledge the black hole of Six's past and still try to salvage something good out of it—was that love, or the same courtesy that Siete extended to everyone he met?

* * *

There may as well never be a meaning for _love _in Six's vocabulary. The definition of love, after all, continued to include people that distanced themselves from him until he was stripped of his armour and forced to start again.

**Author's Note:**

> at least part of this was gus and faye's idea, shoutout for reminding me that "six is the heir of karm" is a phrase that makes me go absolutely hogwild every single time. six the heir. six the successor. wheezes


End file.
